


Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

by scioscribe



Category: Design for Living (1933)
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 02:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13045029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: George abandoned his brushes.  “And why ishethe one to help you?  That’s what I want to know.  Two artists in this family, you and me, and you go around asking the dramatist for advice.”“Beneath this stained shirt beats the heart of a man whose appreciation of the glories of the muses is not confined to a single field.”“It’s because he’s standing closer,” Gilda said.





	Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quietcuriosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietcuriosity/gifts).



“I’ve forgotten how to be poor,” Tom said, examining a shirt that had been worn enough times for the white to be going over to ivory.  It needed laundering, he'd been saying, but where to take it?  How had they kept themselves decent back in the old days?  “Do either of you remember?”

“I remember it was easier in China,” George said.  He was cleaning out his paintbrushes.  “Back when some little so-and-so had us both so heartbroken we could live on rice wine alone.  Not to speak ill of the dead.”

“I’m not dead,” Gilda said into her pillow.  “I’m only in despair.”  Without looking up, she kicked her sketchbook with her foot and sent it skidding across the bed; a bumpy ride with their patchy coverlet in its natural unmade state.  She had been working on the illustrations for a new _Alice in Wonderland_ edition and the sketchbook was full of rabbits.  Very _dull_ rabbits, in her frequently stated opinion.  “Everything’s coming out Tenniel.”

George glanced at them.  “Rotten.”

“Rotten,” Tom agreed.  “She hasn’t got a shred of talent.”

Gilda sat up.  “Now, do I go around turning your own words back on you?  I call that an ungentlemanly trick.  Maybe you both _are_ hooligans.  And no, Tommy, darling, I don’t remember what it was like to be poor either, but if I loan you a bit of money, _will_ you look at these and tell me honestly what you think of them?”

“Hold out as long as you can,” George said to him.  “She’s hip-deep in alimony and we’re supposed to be starving artists.  Bilk her, Tommy.”

“Yes,” Gilda said.  “Bilk me horribly.  I have money falling out of my hair when I brush it.”

“That’s a neat trick.”

“And every cent of it yours if you help me.”

George abandoned his brushes.  “And why is _he_ the one to help you?  That’s what I want to know.  Two artists in this family, you and me, and you go around asking the dramatist for advice.”

“Beneath this stained shirt beats the heart of a man whose appreciation of the glories of the muses is not confined to a single field.”

“It’s because he’s standing closer,” Gilda said.

“And you are a sucker for proximity,” George said, and then immediately regretted it when Gilda’s face showed she’d taken it on the chin.  It was no use dragging up what was over and done, hadn’t they all shaken hands on that?  And even if they hadn’t, hell, he had been no better.  He had fallen into Gilda’s arms when Tom was gone and into Tom’s when Gilda was gone—call that second the unexpected, or at least half-unexpected, side effect of the _baijiu_.

“Don’t listen to him, Gilda, he’s a brute.”  Tom stretched himself across the bed.  “Didn’t I always tell you?”

“I just think it’s not really sporting to bring it up,” she said.

“It wasn’t,” George said.  “I stand before you a cad.  Come here, sweetheart,” and he bent and kissed her hair; a sacrifice, he wanted to point out, for a man as tall as he was.  If he took on any more friends with a habit of lolling on the furniture, he’d wind up with a permanent stoop.  But since he was there, already at an angle, and since Tom’s dark head was downturned next to Gilda’s, George brushed his lips there too.

Tommy looked up at him, guarded surprise in his face.  “What do you think, Gilda?  Is he animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

“Animal,” Gilda said.  “Entirely animal.”

“I quite agree.  Now _these_ rabbits, I think, are the ones you want to lean into, even if the rest aren’t fit for anything but the stewpot.  These aren’t warmed-up classics, they’ve got a bit of you in them.”

Gilda twitched her nose, rabbit-like.

“Exactly so.  But I mean it—George, do you see what I mean?  About these ones here?”

George did, as a matter of fact.  The white rabbits Tom was pointing at were the ones with the most humor—slightly anxious, but there all the same—in their furry little faces and the ones with just that bit of wear to their waistcoats.  And they were delicate— _there_ he could see Gilda’s commercial training falling away a little into something new she was doing, something he had almost been afraid to point out in case it spooked her back into being nothing but their critic.  It was nothing he could put his finger to, anyway, not something that was purely a question of technique even if it worked out that way, in a rabbit’s ears so finely transparent that you could almost see the blood working through them even though they were only charcoal on paper.

“Those are the real tabasco,” George said, and then remembered that they were supposed to be at least a little discouraging.  “They aren’t _as_ fit for the ash-heap as all the rest.”

“Oh, George!  Do you really think so?”  She sat up, her eyes sparkling.

Was it strange to think he wanted to take her to bed when she was already there?  And so, for that matter, was Tom, his Tommy.  George had never called him that until Gilda had come along and done it.

Tom was right, they really were all out of habit with being poor.  If they’d all been Plunketts or Eaglebauers, they’d have had whole acres of marble-floored house to put between them, one from the other, when moments like this cranked up the rackety old machinery.  Put enough chimneys in a place and you wouldn’t know who was howling out of one of them.  But in the garret, they were packed together like sardines, and everybody knew what sardines got up to, didn’t they?

No, he guessed they didn’t, or he didn’t, anyway.  He just had rabbits on the brain.  That was what he was thinking of.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Gilda said, scooting back on the bed and going up on her knees so she could come a little closer to looking him eye-to-eye.  “We _talked_ about this, George.  We shook hands on it.”

“Concentrate on the work.”

“Concentrate on the work!”

“On the rabbits and Tom’s shirts—”

“My shirts are very important, I’ll have you know.  People like their starving artists better with paintbrushes than typewriters.  I can’t meet with directors—”

“—and whatever I’m doing,” George finished.  He frowned.  “What _am_ I doing?”

“Ignoring commissions,” Gilda said.  “Working on your masterpiece.”

“Oh, right, of course.  One of you remind me again what my masterpiece is supposed to be.  I only remember that there’s not to be a bicycle in it and there’s a question of how many chins are allowed per painting.”

The lovely thing about them both was they never said, “Oh, do be serious.”  Tommy sometimes pled for them to be more refined and Gilda for them to be more sensible, but none of them ever wanted serious.  They’d had enough seriousness to last a lifetime.  _He_ had, anyway.  When you betray a friend and then get betrayed and then get abandoned and then break up a marriage and then pin your sex life up like a chloroformed butterfly, you declare yourself overdue for comedy.

And—he’d been thinking this over a little—in Tom’s comedies, people were always winding up in bed together.  What was the rule of French farce?  Three people, one bedroom, two doors?  All they were short was that second door, and who needed it?

“Your eyes are suggestive,” Gilda said.

“Animal,” Tom said, in the tone of someone only giving his opinion.

“And I think you both are mineral,” George said.  “Hearts made of stone.  Other parts too.”

“Oh, wait.”  Tom scrambled up and over to the typewriter.  “Say that again.”

This was always happening, and whenever it did, it was never because Tommy thought you had come up with anything clever: he got all his cleverest lines from himself and declared that he only had to mine the rest of the world for inanity.  George sighed and repeated himself.

“Now look, boys,” Gilda said.  “We’ve come a long way from where we were!  We’ve got the garret and two acts of a play and _Alice in Wonderland_ and, well, George, admittedly you don’t have anything at the moment besides a case of painter’s block that would rival Van Gogh’s, but you’ll get there in the end.  Why, you’ve cleaned a dozen brushes in a quarter of an hour.  I call that good work.  We don’t need sex and clean shirts.  What we need is—”  She flexed her mouth, as if unable to find exactly the right word behind those pretty lips.

She tried again.

“What we need is—oh, nuts.”

“I entirely agree,” Tom said, lying back down on the bed.  “Nuts and sex and clean shirts for all.”  And with no more lead-up than that, he reached up and tugged Gilda down by the silk sleeve of her robe and kissed her until her lipstick was dark on his mouth.

George thought it was unfair of the two of them to have just gotten going like that.  Well, that was the old devil of proximity again.  And Tom never had wasted time.  George and Gilda had taken a whole fortnight to get undressed the first time around and Tom, like some ghost out of Dickens, had done it all in one night.  Maybe it was time to stop trying to go back through what had happened when and where, and who’d done what to whom.  He’d said it before: he loved them both.  He couldn’t believe he loved them both.

He smiled.  “Three animals.”

“Let’s _please_ not play Twenty Questions,” Gilda said.

George took up her sketchbook and laid it down neatly on the desk, the best rabbits facing outwards.  Maybe the little hot-to-trot devils would give them all some luck this time around.  _That_ was what they should have been asking the questions about, about whether or not they’d all three just end up heartbroken and trying to be nice, but he had a good feeling about it.  It was celibacy that had put the wrench in the works before.  Celibacy and then the conviction that you could only fit two per swan boat in the Tunnel of Love.

But they were all artists now, weren’t they?  None of them were trying to be nice girls or respectable men.  Everybody expected this kind of thing out of artists.  The only ones George knew who were faithfully married tried their hardest to keep it a secret so they wouldn’t break out in a dreadful lack of scandal, worse than the mumps.

“Fine.  No names to anything.  We’ll all just stay stuck on animal and not go after it any further.”

“Animals and hats,” Tommy said.  “Hey, George, we have to pick out a hat for Gilda.”

“You’re both awfully cavalier all of a sudden,” Gilda said, and then the faint wrinkle of suspicion between her brows smoothed out into joy and she smiled a big, toothy smile that would have horrified any Eaglebauer with an ax to grind on gentility.  “Well, if nobody had to make me into a damn tug-of-war rope, why did we go through all that anyway?  You’re both a little slow, that’s what I think.  Eleven years of knowing each other before you met me and you couldn’t put the pieces together till China?”

“But in China we put the pieces together just fine,” Tom said.

“Frequently,” George said.

“Then why did we have this rotten handshake the _second_ time?”

George blinked.  “How were we supposed to know you’d want to make another go of it?  You were the one who’d run off to be a nice girl, and nice girls don’t—”

“Oh, you both make me so mad I could _spit_.”  She wriggled her dress down her shoulders until her breasts were bared.  “And to think I would have spent the rest of my life being Mrs. Plunkett, dragging around a name that sounds like you’ve dropped something, and the two of you would have let me do it!  Mother of the arts—I wouldn’t take up that job again if you paid me.”

“We can’t,” Tom said.

George nodded.  “Spent it all in China.  You know, Tommy, Gilda’s a very pretty girl.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing.  I don’t know that you’re so bad yourself.”

“There’s no percentage in it,” Gilda said.  “Either one of you.  Looks that would break a girl’s heart—or a man’s, I guess—and you waste them all on being _gentlemen_.”  She lay back.  “Come on, boys, let’s make like bunnies.”

“I do have another scene to get through,” Tom said.

“Your scene is awful.  It’s not fit for the paper it’s printed on.  If you don’t agree, whisk it out of the typewriter and read it out loud while George and I have some fun with you.”

“And you say you’re through being inspiring,” Tom said.  George could still see the hesitation on his face, emotions moving around like fish in a fishbowl under that look of his, but when he came back with the paper rolled up in his hand, it was, if not gone, then submerged down to the place where such things went when they weren’t being used for art or love.  Poor Tommy.

And poor Gilda, who hadn’t known because they hadn’t thought to tell her, because they’d hung that married name of hers around her neck like a dog’s collar, listened to the bell on it right and said, oh, sure, unconventional enough to run off but still conventional enough for _Max_ , so—better keep quiet, right?

Hopeless cases, all of them.  Even if they’d all three split up for good, they’d never be over each other; neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral.

Just as George was getting into bed with them, he saw at last the next picture he would paint; a very unsellable, very delectable portrait.  He could see every brushstroke.  He could see every dirtied brush soaking in a jar of water, color creeping out everywhere, unstoppable.  He maybe liked that even better.


End file.
